DJ: Pretty good, how have you been?

DJ: Everything starts from The Spinal Archive. The drawings are all based on entries for a particular case and are built up starting with a photograph or schematic. You take an image or several if I want to cross reference them and then build upon it in layers.

DJ: Drawings can take months and I may come back to them several times.

DJ: Yes, always by hand.

DJ: The numbers represent the entries in the archive but the material you look at is pre the start so all 00000. Then the next work the numbers will go up 00001 00002 and so on. It was a way of ordering a seemingly random stream of information and images. Much in the way the drawings do by building a joining together.

DJ: It’s less binary and more like a spine in a body. Once you have the spine you can start to grow off all kinds of organs, bone structures, so to speak, and a kind of living body of information exists.

 

 

DJ: Well, it is. Or rather it was an aspect in a case. The case concerned focused on a woman attacked during a robbery.

DJ: Minuet detail was paid to certain aspects of her wounds in such an abstract way as to be almost a kind of pornography. Working with images of similar wounds, I built up a profile of wounds that though based on the details were completely imaginary. She became a rather iconic woman at the time; beautiful, rich etcetera. Yet she hid her eyes and walked injured with a cane. Her wounds were a massive focal point for the imagination of the readers, yet we saw no images. Everyone reading the story did what I did and just constructed the wounds in their minds. It creates a completely abstract but very visual level of reality that only exists in or imaginations.

DJ: I imagine them, build upon the information I am given and I never have a moral position.

DJ: Can you be objective with your own imagination?

DJ: Like any good science fiction; it starts with the question 'what if'.

DJ: Within the bounds of the information available

DJ: Well, it's not a process of automatic drawing; it works a bit more like cancer.

Cells that are out of control but have their origins in your own flesh.

 

 

DJ: In a much organised way. I feel more like an administrator, collating images and expanding or extending angles or trajectories. Like somewhere between a scientist and a pornographer were both strive for objectivity of a kind.

DJ: Objectivity is what's necessary, what I’m interested in are the results, what comes out, what variation and some sort of breach into the inner landscape. I suppose that's what the images are supposed to do.